Love After Love

Love After Love

By Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Poem by Rumi

 “Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
 
—Rumi

“It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not?”

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning